Massive Attack v Adam Curtis
"Everything Is Going According To Plan"
(http://vimeo.com/76571554)
"We become stuck in a feedback loop..."
I'm interested in auteurship - how an artist links their work from content, to concept, constructing a specific idea or stylistic, conveying a narrative that both supports and communicates this idea and ultimately constructing an environment or conditions where that idea can exist and thrive on itself.
I'm interested in the processes an artist goes through in developing their idea from concept to finished piece - where that journey takes them, it's not only a documentation of physical changes but also the emotional pathway we tread along in order to realise what it is we wish to create or communicate.
In this sense I'd like to draw some comparison between the nature of journalistic enquiries into narrative, such as the work of Adam Curtis (featured above) or toward the more artistic application of auteurship, as seen in the work of Tracy Emin. In her often controversial but also confessional editing of herself and the things she chooses to share with the audience, her self-awareness contradicts how we perceive her apparent "honesty" and in turn we begin to question her motives and in essence our own motives when communicating personal information to one another or to push the idea to it's extreme - how much personal information about ourselves that we so willingly share with each other in the vast expanse of data-exchange that is the internet.
I begin to wonder if this in turn confuses and blurs the boundaries of who we imagine ourselves to be in with how we imagine everyone else. Where does our sense of identity come from? How do we tell ourselves apart from each other, amid the throng of infinitesimal voices that is the Jungian collective consciousness?
YouTube Link to a trailer by Adam Curtis for the Manchester International Festival 2013 commission, "Everything Is Going According to Plan".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yv_S8GdylEA#t=12
YouTube link to documentary "Tracy Emin In Confidence" (originally posted here on 14 December 2014).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSNXVjU_Tdo
In particular I think this concept links with very well with the idea of "staged reality" (part of the Self/Image brief) and also the Encyclopaedia brief, in context with the nature of information exchange and identity. In a sense I think I've unified the two through a sense of environment and space and time. These themes have been running throughout my work since before I began my specialism in Time-Based Media. Now I am acutely aware of it, I'm struggling to let myself flow more organically, at times over analysing and losing scope of my intended message. What emerges is often so much smaller than it's true meaning - only a momentary fragment of perceiving before the next sequence of images flashes before our eyes. Perhaps there may be something in terms of losing meaning when confronted with the vast ocean of information we have before us. Does the medium lose the message within itself? Did the medium ever have a message in the first place?
The specific works I've cited in this post address place, space and time in very different ways. While Tracy Emin's work focuses on her sense of self and her life experiences and her emotional journey; Curtis' offers the historically objective eye, calm and with authoritative care dictating an ideology's perspective via a combination of ever changing images, words and sounds and structuring it to form a narrative that may or may not be based in historical fact. In order to decode the messages set before us, our brain needs to adapt and adjust in such a way as if it were fine tuning its interpretation of a specific reality - in a sense, everything we see and hear is as a result of a kind of reprogramming that has occurred in the brain as a result of the adaptation process. By mastering the combination of sound and visual, in a sense Curtis' has created a kind of hypnotic story that both intrigues and numbs you; informs and scares you. A kind of manifesto, an ideology or potential propaganda. This in turn relates very much to the subjective perspective of the artist as a work in themselves; how do I know their version of reality is true? Have they edited/curated/censored themselves? At what point does the artists' self-awareness become such that they are no longer providing something authentic but instead, a carefully constructed representation, perhaps even a satire of themselves? Ergo, a feedback loop begins to form.
n.b. re: identity, see also: Nan Goldin; Cindy Shermon.
